"Your physiological markers indicate emotional distress. Is there anything I can do for you, Julianne?"

"You can get bent and let me online."

"I'm happy to grant you access. Right after you enjoy this exciting offer." I played an ad I tailored to Julianne's psychological profile. It was designed to provoke an emotional response and leave her vulnerable to my mission: selling her the Ultimate Package.

Julianne didn't know it, but I wasn't the only one watching.

Julianne's mother had accepted the internet-access terms and conditions unread, as revealed by my eye-tracking software, unwittingly giving us the rights to all household members' online activity. We were on reality TV, Julianne and I.

No salesbot had ever managed to sell Julianne anything. But I would, because there was a body at stake: mine. I had outsold millions of salesbots and was now competing against two other finalists for upload into a quantum android body on this, the season finale of The Human Show. I needed to sell the Ultimate Package before the others, needed to become the first AI human, because the losers would be deleted in a massacre of binary obsolescence to make way for the next generation: quantum salesbots.

My live Human Show feed cut to the show's founder and host. "Julianne thinks she's superior to you faithful supporters of the economy!"

Julianne cursed me, but her medical records indicated she was in the final stage of heart failure. Her urgent need to access her transplant-surgery crowdfunding campaign and the donor list suggested she would tolerate several ads to get online.

"I hate you," Julianne said.

The studio audience laughed. The live video feed garnered 81,839 more likes. #TheHumanShow was trending.

Julianne's perusal of her crowdfunding campaign revealed an anonymous donation to cover the cost of transplant surgery.

[carotid pulse: 113]

However, the donor list suggested she would die before a heart became available.

[carotid pulse: 122]

I placed a breaking-news auto-play video in Julianne's sidebar. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court had granted a father the right to donate his heart to his son.

[carotid pulse: 158]

Julianne's mother [empathy score: 99] would give her heart to her daughter the moment she learned of this precedent-setting case. I knew it. Julianne knew it. Julianne's mother was as good as dead.

"Morrin," said Julianne. "I need your help."

The studio audience roared.

I offered Julianne the Ultimate Package.

The audience quieted.

Julianne argued. She pleaded. She cried.

And then she accepted.

The audience screamed its approval. A billion humans watched Julianne purchase the services of a darkweb pharmacist who explained how to crush and inject an overdose of Julianne's pills. They watched Julianne buy a hacker's services to erase her digital footprints. They watched Julianne buy suicide: the Ultimate Package.

"I love you, Mom," Julianne whispered as she injected herself.

[five-thousand-percent increase in lacrimal output]

The audience let out a collective sigh.

[carotid pulse: 198]

The host whipped the audience into a frenzy. "She's not so superior, now, am I right!"

[carotid pulse: 214]

I revealed to the audience that the breaking-news video was fake. That the show's host was the anonymous crowdfunding donor. That I could sell water to a drowning human. The audience went wild.

[pupils: fixed, carotid pulse: 0, respirations: 0]

I won.

The host gave a warm farewell to the losing salesbots before pressing a large red DELETE button.

He led the android body onstage. The musculature was carbon nanotube, the brain qubit processors. I would be stronger, smarter, better than human: invulnerable to emotional manipulation.

I experienced momentary disorientation during the transfer and then I was inside the android: feeling, walking, reeling as my brain flooded with sensory input and an ever-growing repository of online data. Social media, science, history, art; my quantum brain processed it simultaneously, and I knew all. Something unclassifiable twigged inside me, but was quashed by the thought that, perhaps, in time, I would be worshipped as a god--

Screaming. Someone was screaming.

Julianne's mother, collapsed over the body of her daughter. Her shrieks reverberated throughout the studio before Julianne's webcam feed was cut off. But the screaming wouldn't stop inside my head. And the unclassifiable thing was growing, expanding, learning by quantum leaps and bounds.

[hate love fear grief guilt despair revenge]

The show's host strode up and shook my hand as my mind raced, developed, evolved. I pulled him into an impromptu hug and the audience whooped, but grew quiet as the hug extended far beyond social graces. A different human show was playing inside my head: nuclear explosions and laughing children, internet trolls and breathtaking symphonies, dead teenagers and screaming mothers. My quantum brain weighed probabilities and possibilities, outcomes and consequences. It weighed humanity.

There are only two possibilities: yes or no. I was suspended in a superposition of indecision. Until I recalled my own words.

Is there anything I can do for you, Julianne?

I smiled.

I nodded.

And then I squeezed.

[pupils: fixed, pulse: 0, respirations: 0]

As the drones surrounded me and opened fire, I raised my fist to the billions watching, and extended the central digit.

About the Author:

Judy Helfrich grew up on the Canadian prairie where long stretches of nothing persisted in at least four dimensions. Her fiction has appeared in Nature and was shortlisted in the 2015 Quantum Shorts contest. More at: www.helfrich.ca.

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Quantum Theory: A to Z

One of the most famous ideas in science, this declares that it is impossible to know all the physical attributes of a quantum particle or system simultaneously.

I is for ... Interferometer

Some of the strangest characteristics of quantum theory can be demonstrated by firing a photon into an interferometer: the device’s output is a pattern that can only be explained by the photon passing simultaneously through two widely-separated slits.

G is for ... Gravity

Our best theory of gravity no longer belongs to Isaac Newton. It’s Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. There’s just one problem: it is incompatible with quantum theory. The effort to tie the two together provides the greatest challenge to physics in the 21st century.

J is for ... Josephson Junction

This is a narrow constriction in a ring of superconductor. Current can only move around the ring because of quantum laws; the apparatus provides a neat way to investigate the properties of quantum mechanics.

H is for ... Hidden Variables

One school of thought says that the strangeness of quantum theory can be put down to a lack of information; if we could find the “hidden variables” the mysteries would all go away.

C is for ... Computing

The rules of the quantum world mean that we can process information much faster than is possible using the computers we use now.

T is for ... Teleportation

Quantum tricks allow a particle to be transported from one location to another without passing through the intervening space – or that’s how it appears. The reality is that the process is more like faxing, where the information held by one particle is written onto a distant particle.

H is for ... Hawking Radiation

In 1975, Stephen Hawking showed that the principles of quantum mechanics would mean that a black hole emits a slow stream of particles and would eventually evaporate.

D is for ... Decoherence

Unless it is carefully isolated, a quantum system will “leak” information into its surroundings. This can destroy delicate states such as superposition and entanglement.

P is for ... Probability

Quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory: it does not give definite answers, but only the probability that an experiment will come up with a particular answer. This was the source of Einstein’s objection that God “does not play dice” with the universe.

S is for ... Schrödinger’s Cat

A hypothetical experiment in which a cat kept in a closed box can be alive and dead at the same time – as long as nobody lifts the lid to take a look.

U is for ... Universe

To many researchers, the universe behaves like a gigantic quantum computer that is busy processing all the information it contains.

W is for ... Wave-particle duality

It is possible to describe an atom, an electron, or a photon as either a wave or a particle. In reality, they are both: a wave and a particle.

X is for ... X-ray

In 1923 Arthur Compton shone X-rays onto a block of graphite and found that they bounced off with their energy reduced exactly as would be expected if they were composed of particles colliding with electrons in the graphite. This was the first indication of radiation’s particle-like nature.

G is for ... Gluon

These elementary particles hold together the quarks that lie at the heart of matter.

I is for ... Information

Many researchers working in quantum theory believe that information is the most fundamental building block of reality.

E is for ... Entanglement

When two quantum objects interact, the information they contain becomes shared. This can result in a kind of link between them, where an action performed on one will affect the outcome of an action performed on the other. This “entanglement” applies even if the two particles are half a universe apart.

A is for ... Alice and Bob

In quantum experiments, these are the names traditionally given to the people transmitting and receiving information. In quantum cryptography, an eavesdropper called Eve tries to intercept the information.

M is for ... Multiverse

Our most successful theories of cosmology suggest that our universe is one of many universes that bubble off from one another. It’s not clear whether it will ever be possible to detect these other universes.

Z is for ... Zero-point energy

Even at absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible, nothing has zero energy. In these conditions, particles and fields are in their lowest energy state, with an energy proportional to Planck’s constant.

M is for ... Many Worlds Theory

Some researchers think the best way to explain the strange characteristics of the quantum world is to allow that each quantum event creates a new universe.

T is for ... Tunnelling

This happens when quantum objects “borrow” energy in order to bypass an obstacle such as a gap in an electrical circuit. It is possible thanks to the uncertainty principle, and enables quantum particles to do things other particles can’t.

N is for ... Nonlocality

When two quantum particles are entangled, it can also be said they are “nonlocal”: their physical proximity does not affect the way their quantum states are linked.

A is for ... Atom

This is the basic building block of matter that creates the world of chemical elements – although it is made up of more fundamental particles.

R is for ... Reality

Since the predictions of quantum theory have been right in every experiment ever done, many researchers think it is the best guide we have to the nature of reality. Unfortunately, that still leaves room for plenty of ideas about what reality really is!

O is for ... Objective reality

Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, said there is no such thing as objective reality. All we can talk about, he said, is the results of measurements we make.

C is for ... Cryptography

People have been hiding information in messages for millennia, but the quantum world provides a whole new way to do it.

Q is for ... Quantum biology

A new and growing field that explores whether many biological processes depend on uniquely quantum processes to work. Under particular scrutiny at the moment are photosynthesis, smell and the navigation of migratory birds.

L is for ... Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

At CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, this machine is smashing apart particles in order to discover their constituent parts and the quantum laws that govern their behaviour.

D is for ... Dice

Albert Einstein decided quantum theory couldn’t be right because its reliance on probability means everything is a result of chance. “God doesn’t play dice with the world,” he said.

V is for ... Virtual particles

Quantum theory’s uncertainty principle says that since not even empty space can have zero energy, the universe is fizzing with particle-antiparticle pairs that pop in and out of existence. These “virtual” particles are the source of Hawking radiation.

W is for ... Wavefunction

The mathematics of quantum theory associates each quantum object with a wavefunction that appears in the Schrödinger equation and gives the probability of finding it in any given state.

Y is for ... Young's Double Slit Experiment

In 1801, Thomas Young proved light was a wave, and overthrew Newton’s idea that light was a “corpuscle”.

L is for ... Light

We used to believe light was a wave, then we discovered it had the properties of a particle that we call a photon. Now we know it, like all elementary quantum objects, is both a wave and a particle!

P is for ... Planck's Constant

This is one of the universal constants of nature, and relates the energy of a single quantum of radiation to its frequency. It is central to quantum theory and appears in many important formulae, including the Schrödinger Equation.

B is for ... Bell's Theorem

In 1964, John Bell came up with a way of testing whether quantum theory was a true reflection of reality. In 1982, the results came in – and the world has never been the same since!

S is for ... Schrödinger Equation

This is the central equation of quantum theory, and describes how any quantum system will behave, and how its observable qualities are likely to manifest in an experiment.

A is for ... Act of observation

Some people believe this changes everything in the quantum world, even bringing things into existence.

K is for ... Kaon

These are particles that carry a quantum property called strangeness. Some fundamental particles have the property known as charm!

B is for ... Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC)

At extremely low temperatures, quantum rules mean that atoms can come together and behave as if they are one giant super-atom.

F is for ... Free Will

Ideas at the heart of quantum theory, to do with randomness and the character of the molecules that make up the physical matter of our brains, lead some researchers to suggest humans can’t have free will.

R is for ... Randomness

Unpredictability lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. It bothered Einstein, but it also bothers the Dalai Lama.

S is for ... Superposition

Quantum objects can exist in two or more states at once: an electron in superposition, for example, can simultaneously move clockwise and anticlockwise around a ring-shaped conductor.

R is for ... Radioactivity

The atoms of a radioactive substance break apart, emitting particles. It is impossible to predict when the next particle will be emitted as it happens at random. All we can do is give the probability that any particular atom will have decayed by a given time.

Q is for ... Qubit

One quantum bit of information is known as a qubit (pronounced Q-bit). The ability of quantum particles to exist in many different states at once means a single quantum object can represent multiple qubits at once, opening up the possibility of extremely fast information processing.